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Elizabeth Graver Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Elizabeth Graver
Photo: Jo Eldredge Morrisey

Elizabeth Graver

Elizabeth Graver Biography

Elizabeth Graver's fifth novel, Kantika, was inspired by her grandmother, Rebecca née Cohen Baruch Levy, who was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul and whose tumultuous and shape-shifting life journey took her to Spain, Cuba and finally New York.

Elizabeth's fourth novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction and selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her other novels are Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Essays. The mother of two young adult daughters, she teaches at Boston College.

Elizabeth Graver's website

This bio was last updated on 03/20/2023. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

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Interview

A Q&A with Elizabeth Graver on her recent book, The End of the Point, a portrait of one family's journey through the second half of the twentieth century

How did The End of the Point originate?
My novel The End of the Point took me a long time to write, both because of the particular challenges and pleasures that went into it and because over the past decade, my non-writing life has been very full—with the birth of two children, the illness and death of my father, the daily routines of teaching and family life, and, perhaps most centrally, the growing sense that I didn't want to rush; time moves fast enough on its own. Over they ears, as the story took shape, I spent a part of every summer and many fall and spring weekends at the real place that my fictional place grew out of. Often,while I was there, I wrote. I walked the paths, navigated the rocks to swim in the ocean and began to feel that the land—and the one-room cabin my husband had built on it—was a kind of home to me—not(as it is to my husband and our daughters) a first home, but a surrogate second home, at once alluring and vexed. I watched my children learn to walk, swim and ve in nature there, the place a great gift for them but also a complicated privilege and even a danger—for how fully it can shelter and how much it can exclude. I used this real place as a way to begin to imagine my ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Elizabeth Graver at BookBrowse
Kantika jacket The End of the Point jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Elizabeth Graver but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Chris Bohjalian

    Chris Bohjalian

    Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-three books, including Hour of the Witch, The Red Lotus, Midwives, and The Flight Attendant, was the basis for the hit HBO Max television series starring ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The End of the Point

    Try:
    The Sandcastle Girls
    by Chris Bohjalian

  • Amity Gaige

    Amity Gaige

    Amity Gaige is the author of three novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, and Schroder, which was shortlisted for The Folio Prize in 2014. To date, Schroder has been published in eighteen countries.

    Schroder was named one... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The End of the Point

    Try:
    Schroder
    by Amity Gaige

We recommend 4 similar authors

View all 4 Read-Alikes

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In Our Midst
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In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
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